I have no idea! You and I have the same credibility as our state media, as they echo Biden spokepeople and Biden himself, who also have absolutely no idea what Putin is planning.
This is what we do know:
- The war in Ukraine will be completely televised, scripted, packaged, and presented for your consumption.
- While filmed in Ukraine, it is all about Germany, and more specifically, the American effort to eliminate the already constructed and ready to flow Nordstream 2.
- Ukraine doesn’t matter to average Americans, but isn’t it frightening how little regard for Ukrainian lives that Biden has? Did Ukrainians not pay their 10% to the Big Guy? Are they nothing more than expendable extras?
- Employees of NATO, the US CIA and State Department, and US businesses are all pulling out of Ukraine, by edict or because of the breathless news of yesterday’s today’s tomorrow’s invasion from the east.
- Members of Ukraine’s crony government and their beneficiaries are leaving the country in droves.
- Germany is getting a reminder of how subordinate the US government believes Germany is, as if 1945 were only yesterday. Most Germans today just want to have some affordable clean energy and get back to global trade. But that is not what the US leadership wants, so Germany be damned.
- The US Government is feverishly approving US arms sales to nearby NATO countries.
When you look at the facts above, while we don’t know what Putin is planning, it may not turn out that badly for him after all.
Ukrainian despots are leaving the country, while eastern territories gratefully looking for help from Russia proper. NATO countries are wasting money on weapons that won’t be used, but will continue to drain their coffers for decades of US upgrades and maintenance. US callous abandons their Ukrainian stooges, cultivated for decades by the likes of Biden, McCain, and the neocons. Germany, politically held together by a new coalition, is a Germany that just wants affordable energy and a little respect. If anyone must tell Germany what they must suffer and what Germans must do, is it to be a strange little man across the Atlantic and his barking neocons? Well, is it?
This movie is going to be a flop, and may not make it to the big screen at all. While it is being broadly promoted in the US and parts of Europe, it turns out that – just like the movie industry itself – what used to be a US-dominated creative enterprise has long outgrown the US.
Maybe it was inevitable. When wars became theater, people would critique the actors, write bad reviews, not buy tickets, and pay attention to other things.
American wars have certainly become bad theater, with each new sequel worse than its predecessor. Who can argue that Iraq II was far less entertaining than the Persian Gulf War circa 1991? Afghanistan the Occupation wasn’t nearly the patriotic draw as when the US helped Freedom Fighter Osama bin Laden beat back the Russians in the 1980s. Heavily US-funded NATO has also offered us a worsening series of shows since the heady days of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, ad nauseum. “NATO War: Ukraine” won’t be anyone’s bonanza.
If Ukraine’s Zelensky actually talks to Putin and they decide – under the threat of a disastrous war and NATO-US funded destabilization – to correct and implement Minsk II, or make a new agreement, one that allows all parties freedom to prosper, and allows neighbors to be neighborly, this could very well be what Putin is planning.
NATO has no place in the modern Europe, and it will have no place in Ukraine – despite Anthony Blinken’s assertion to the contrary. Only a few years ago, when Trump demanded they pay their fair share, NATO members should have looked at their own books, and started figuring out their own exit strategies. Perhaps some did, like Denmark, and then discovered this wouldn’t be allowed.
Putin has presided over a Russia that has become economically independent, militarily modern, debt-free, and moving into a future of Euro-Asian trade that blesses and enriches both seller and buyer. He must be intimidating to many western leaders, who envy his power, his leverage, and his good luck.
Biden, on the other hand, is a lifelong and decaying crony of the US political establishment. He presides over a divided country that owes its lenders and its citizens over $30 Trillion. He shrieks about an imminent Russian invasion 6 time zones away with the certainty of the insane. His proudest role seems to be as commander in chief of the world’s most bloated and under-performing military, a military now demanding nearly a trillion dollars a year from an empty treasury, and without a real war in sight.
We don’t know what Putin is planning. We can’t know what the US President is planning, because his advisors haven’t settled on a story yet. Strategic geniuses they are not. Maybe Putin is just trying to enjoy the show, knowing – like so many in the United States and around the world – that this franchise has finally jumped the shark.
